from the build-it-and-they-won't-come dept

Back in August a report emerged claiming that Google Fiber executives were having some second thoughts about this whole "building a nationwide fiber network from the ground up" thing. More specifically, the report suggested that some executives were disappointed with the slow pace of digging fiber trenches, and were becoming bullish on the idea of using next-gen wireless to supplement fiber after acquiring fixed wireless provider Webpass. As such, the report said the company was pondering some staff reductions, some executive changes, and a bit of a pivot.

Fast forward to this week when Access CEO Craig Barrett posted a cheery but ambiguous blog post not only formally announcing most of these changes, but his own resignation as CEO. According to Barrett, Google will continue to serve and expand Google Fiber's existing markets (Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Kansas City, Nashville, Provo, Salt Lake City, and The Triangle in North Carolina), and will also build out previously-announced but not yet started efforts in Huntsville, Alabama; San Antonio, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and Irvine, California.

From there, the direction Google Fiber will be headed gets murky. According to Barrett, Google has paused (read: killed) potential deployments in cities where Google Fiber had been having conversations, but hadn't yet given the green light for full deployment (Portland, Chicago, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose, and Tampa). Most of the layoffs will be in these cities, notes Barrett:

"For most of our “potential Fiber cities” — those where we’ve been in exploratory discussions — we’re going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches. We’re ever grateful to these cities for their ongoing partnership and patience, and we’re confident we’ll have an opportunity to resume our partnership discussions once we’ve advanced our technologies and solutions. In this handful of cities that are still in an exploratory stage, and in certain related areas of our supporting operations, we’ll be reducing our employee base."

A report over at Bloomberg notes that about 9% of employees at Access (which covers multiple projects, not just Google Fiber) will be let go, which is notably fewer staff reductions than last summer's report had suggested. Bloomberg's insiders also claim that there have been some rifts among executives at Google/Alphabet/Access over whether to remain dedicated to the laborious process of fiber installations, or to pivot more completely to wireless:

"Moving into big cities was a contentious point inside Google Fiber, according to one former executive. Leaders like Barratt and Dennis Kish, who runs Google Fiber day-to-day, pushed for the big expansion. Others pushed back because of the prohibitive cost of digging up streets to lay fiber-optic cables across some of America’s busiest cities."

That there's some hesitation isn't surprising. Not only is building a fiber network from the ground up incredibly hard, expensive, and time consuming, the telecom industry is awash with deep pocketed incumbents intent on making things as difficult as possible for competitors like Google Fiber (and downright impossible for smaller ISPs). From AT&T suing cities to thwart attempts to streamline utility pole attachments, to incumbent ISPs writing awful state law prohibiting public/private partnerships, telecom can certainly be a cesspool of protectionism of the worst sort.

While these incumbent ISPs (and their armies of paid policy mouthpieces) will likely spend the next few weeks celebrating the "death of Google Fiber," there's nothing stopping the company from pivoting to next-generation wireless. Google has filed applications with the FCC to conduct trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. That said, it certainly remains possible that at some point Google gets tired of ramming its head against VerizoCasT&T and sells the project off in a few years, leaving us with another sad historical footnote in the often pitiful national quest for something vaguely resembling broadband competition.

from the glass-mansions dept

For decades, incumbent broadband ISPs have all but owned state legislatures, often to the point where they're quite literally allowed to write awful state law that actively harms state consumers. That's why it has proven amusing to see these same ISPs cry like petulant children at Google Fiber's disruption of the uncompetitive broadband market. AT&T, for example, has sued Louisville and Nashville for passing pole attachment reform that would speed up broadband deployment, all while claiming that doing so gives Google Fiber an unfair advantage.

Enter freshly-mega-merged Charter Communications, which has also now filed a different lawsuit against Louisville (pdf) under a Charter-owned subsidiary named Insight Kentucky Partners II -- claiming that its Constitutional rights are being violated. Why? Because Lousiville struck a better franchise deal with Google Fiber than the one Charter signed years ago. Charter tries to defend saddling Louisville with a lawsuit using basketball metaphors in comments to the Louisville Courier Journal:

"The current situation is like requiring the University of Louisville to use the NBA 3-point line, while its opponents use the closer college line," said Mike Pedelty, a Charter spokesman. "More burdensome regulation inevitably means a higher cost to do business and ultimately higher prices for customers. We're simply asking the court to ensure the equal treatment state and federal law require."

Here's the thing though: Google Fiber got a better franchise deal from the city because it asked for it -- and because it promised to deliver gigabit broadband competition to the city. There's a reason cities are throwing themselves (and better deals) at Google Fiber, and Charter hopes you'll forget it's because Charter just doesn't try very hard thanks to little competition and the regulatory capture it spent 30 years lobbying for. Charter could negotiate a better deal once its current franchise contract expires, but hopes that legal threats will allow the cable giant to get out of its obligations more quickly.

Charter's lawsuit also again tries to claim that pole attachment reform -- often used by incumbent ISPs as yet another way to slow new market entrants (there's more detail here) -- will cause all manner of horrible technical and PR harm to larger ISPs:

The One-Touch procedures also could allow Insight’s competitors (intentionally or unintentionally) to damage or disrupt Insight’s ability to serve its customers, creating an inaccurate perception in the market about Insight’s service quality and harming its goodwill. These procedures also threaten public safety as Insight is responsible for providing service to critical infrastructure in Louisville Metro, in addition to its customers’ access to 911 and other emergency services. And they intrude upon the exclusive jurisdiction of the Public Service Commission of Kentucky to regulate the use of privately-owned utility poles.

It's certainly understandable that Charter wants the same deal that Google Fiber is getting, and it's all but inevitable it would have gotten it. But it's disingenuous and obnoxious to spend a generation lobbying for and enjoying regulatory capture -- only to whine once an actual competitor comes to town and begins dismantling the status quo. Charter could just get to work competing with Google Fiber -- but as one of the least liked companies in any industry in America -- it apparently feels that it makes much more sense to whine and litigate.

from the don't-build-it-and-they-won't-come dept

Back in February the FCC voted to use its Congressional mandate to ensure speedy broadband deployment to dismantle protectionist state laws intentionally designed to hinder broadband competition. But the FCC recently found itself swatted down by the courts, which argued the agency lacks the authority to pre-empt even the worst portions of these laws. As a result municipal broadband providers continue to run face first into protectionist provisions written by incumbent ISP lawyers and lobbyists solely concerned about protecting the current broken broadband market.

The impact of the FCC's loss is very real. Ars Technica notes that one of the broadband ISPs that originally asked for help from the FCC, Wilson North Carolina's Greenlight, has had to disconnect one neighboring town or face violating state law. With state leaders tone deaf to the problem of letting incumbent ISPs write such laws, and the FCC flummoxed in its attempt to help, about 200 home Internet customers in Pinetops will thus lose access to gigabit broadband service as of October 28:

"We must comply with our state law," Agner said. But city council members were very vocal in their opposition to the law and regret having to disconnect the service, she said. "We have not identified a solution where Greenlight can serve customers outside of our county," Wilson City Manager Grant Goings told The Wilson Times earlier this week before the city council vote. "While we are very passionate about reaching underserved areas and we think the laws are atrocious to prevent people from having service, we’re not going to jeopardize our ability to serve Wilson residents."

Greenlight's fiber network provides speeds of 40Mbps to 1Gbps at prices ranging from $40 to $100 a month, service that's unheard of from any of the regional incumbent providers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable) that lobbied for the protectionist law. Previously, the community of Pinetops only had access to sluggish DSL Service from CenturyLink:

Wilson already had fiber in Pinetops, which has been an electric customer of Wilson's for more than 40 years. Before deploying Internet access to Pinetops, Wilson was laying fiber in the town to support smart grid initiatives. After the FCC voted to let city Internet services expand outside their boundaries, Wilson extended the fiber network to pass the roughly 700 homes in Pinetops, Agner said. Prior to this, Pinetops residents' only option was CenturyLink DSL, she said.

That's the same CenturyLink that's currently using the lack of competition in its markets to begin saddling already slow and expensive DSL service with usage caps and overage fees. ISPs have been very successful in sowing partisan discord by framing municipal broadband as a partisan issue (pesky government interfering in private enterprise!). In reality, most municipal broadband networks have been built in Conservative areas and see broad, bi-partisan support. Disliking the local phone and cable company (and the market failure that built them) is actually something that tends to bring bickering partisans together.

from the fool-me-twice dept

We've noted for years now how Verizon's modus operandi is to promise uniform fiber deployment to a city or state in exchange for all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, then walk away giggling to itself with the job only partially complete. This story has played out time and time again thanks to city and state contracts struck behind closed doors without public transparency, allowing Verizon to bury numerous loopholes in the contract language. Other times, Verizon can lobby to weaken oversight so that there's simply nobody left to hold Verizon accountable when it decides to laugh off the contract requirements.

In 2008, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg struck a closed-door deal with Verizon delivering all manner of tax breaks and incentives in exchange for what the city thought would be 100% deployment of Verizon's FiOS fiber optic service by 2014. Fast forward to last year, when the new city administration realized that Verizon had absolutely no intention of seriously deploying fiber uniformly across the city. This week, the city released the results of a survey it conducted that found that fiber is unsurprisingly still hard to come by:

"The city recently sampled 52,000 addresses for Fios availability, and found that outer boroughs were more likely to have access than Manhattan. For instance, 90% of Staten Island residents could likely get Fios within seven days, while the same is true for just 19% of people in central Brooklyn and 11% in upper Manhattan. About two-thirds of the more than 300 public-housing developments, which are home to more than 400,000 people, have no access to Fios, the city says.

Meanwhile, a letter from the city to the telco (pdf) complains that Verizon is in violation of at least three parts of the original agreement, failed repeatedly to deliver documentation requested during an audit of Verizon's progress, and cites at least 38,551 addresses where Verizon failed to deliver service despite order requests that are more than a year old.

Verizon, as it is wont to do, tries to spin the narrative on its head by claiming that New York City is being "adversarial":

"It is unfortunate and disappointing that the City is taking an adversarial approach to the only company that has challenged New York City’s cable monopolies,” Mr. McConville said. "The City should be working with Verizon to make choice available to more residents, not discouraging competition.”

Except Cities have every right to be adversarial with a company that has shown repeatedly that it doesn't deliver on its promises. Verizon has tried to claim that grumpy landlords are to blame for its failure to deliver FiOS evenly across the city. And while landlords can play a role in delaying some installations, reporters have subsequently discovered that the excuse just doesn't hold water and Verizon's simply not doing the work.

While it was a contract signed under a previous administration, New York City isn't blameless. Reporters at the time pointed out that the city's contract had ample loopholes and should have been negotiated in the full light of public transparency, but nobody listened. So while New York City says it's mulling a lawsuit against Verizon, that suit may run repeatedly into contract caveats carefully crafted by a company that never had any intention of uniform fiber deployment. The contract reflected this had anybody actually bothered to read it.

The amusing (or annoying) thing is that cities keep making the same deals with the proverbial devil over and over again. Philadelphia recently complained that Verizon failed to meet its obligations there as well. And While Verizon's overall FiOS deployment has been frozen, the city just struck a similar deal with Boston -- with few if any in the press bothering to note the tail of frustration and broken promises trailing miles behind the telco and its lawyers.

from the disruption-ain't-easy dept

When Google Fiber jumped into the broadband market in 2011, the company knew full well that disruption of an entrenched telecom monopoly would be a slow, expensive, monumental task. And five years into the project that's certainly been true, the majority of Google Fiber launch markets still very much under construction as the company gets to work burying fiber across more than a dozen looming markets. Wall Street, which initially laughed at the project as an experiment, has been taking the project more seriously as Google Fiber targets sprawling markets like Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

This week however things took an interesting turn with the news that Google Fiber was pausing deployments in Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon, to take stock of possible wireless alternatives. Neither deployment was formally official (both cities were listed as "potential" targets); and Google Fiber execs are simply considering whether or not it makes financial sense to begin using some fifth generation (5G) technologies to supplement existing fiber deployment.

This isn't really surprising; Under the guidance of former Atheros CEO Craig Barratt, Google has filed applications with the FCC to conduct trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. The company also recently acquired Webpass in the hopes of supplementing fiber with ultra-fast wireless wherever possible. Wireless has been on Google's radar for several years. It's a great option in cities where construction logistics are a nightmare, or in towns where AT&T's using regulations to hinder fiber deployment.

Oddly though, as the week wore on, the narrative in the press began to mutate from one focusing on Google Fiber's evolution, to one suggesting that Google Fiber was somehow in trouble. Reports sprung up arguing that Google Fiber was somehow shocked by the steep costs of deploying broadband, ill-prepared for the realities of the telecom market (certainly a narrative incumbent ISP competitors would prefer). Certain stock jocks were quick to proclaim that Google Fiber was somehow backtracking on the initiative:

"Some analysts see the delays as indications that Google Fiber is more strategy than product -- an attempt to get competitors, cities and other service providers to install fiber networks that would foster faster and more widespread consumption of Google's online offerings. "It's not clear (Google was) ever all that serious about doing this at any real size," said MoffettNathanson Research analyst Craig Moffett.

While Google Fiber was initially seen as a creative way to light a PR fire under lazy broadband incumbents (and that certainly is part of the goal), ongoing construction in Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Kansas City, Raleigh, Nashville, Atlanta and countless other markets is continuing slowly but largely as normal, with Google Fiber simply getting more bullish on wireless as the technology evolves. That's not really a "snag," especially if you consider that Google Fiber has been making its interest in wireless as a supplemental technology clear for several years now.

"Google parent Alphabet Inc. is rethinking its high-speed internet business after initial rollouts proved more expensive and time consuming than anticipated, a stark contrast to the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago."

Except Google Fiber isn't "rethinking" the entire business, nor has it hit a "snag." It's simply riding the evolutionary currents, realizing that it needs to embrace multiple concurrent solutions if it wants to get many of these cities up and running sometime this century. In addition to wireless, Google Fiber has embraced a number of other new efforts for the ISP, such as its plan to offer service over a planned municipal fiber build in Huntsville, Alabama, or its plan to begin offering service in Atlanta and San Francisco over existing fiber networks.

Building a nationwide network from the ground up in the face of regulatory capture is hard as hell, and only companies with Alphabet's deep pockets and lobbying muscle are even willing to try at any real scale. Incumbent ISPs certainly benefit from the narrative that the company is in well over its head, but at the moment Google Fiber's simply trying multiple concurrent solutions to see what works. And while it's certainly possible that Alphabet will someday get bored and sell the entire project off to the lowest bidder, at the moment the goal remains the same: deliver a swift kick in the ass to one of the least competitive markets in America.

from the get-the-hell-out-of-the-way dept

We've talked a few times about how incumbent broadband providers often use their ownership of city utility poles (or their "ownership" of entire city councils and state legislatures) to slow Google Fiber's arrival in new markets. In California and Texas, AT&T has often been accused of using the process of pole attachment approval to intentionally block or slow down the arrival of competitors. AT&T also recently sued the city of Louisville for streamlining utility pole attachment rules intended to dramatically speed up the time it takes to attach new fiber to poles.

This week this fight extended into Nashville, where Comcast and AT&T are again fighting pole attachment reform. Google Fiber supports "one touch make ready" pole attachment rules, which lets a licensed, insured third party contractor move any ISP's gear on a utility pole (often a matter of inches) to install new fiber. Being incumbents with networks already deployed, Comcast, AT&T and Charter obviously have a vested interest in making sure this doesn't happen. As such, they've started loudly bitching about Google Fiber to local Nashville news outlets:

"Just because you spell your name with eight different colors doesn’t mean you can’t play by the rules that everybody else has to fucking play by,” says one operative, venting about Google’s reputation for wooing local officials in various cities into accommodating the company.

These incumbents have, as a refresher, spent a generation paying for, writing and lobbying for state and local rules that make it hard or impossible to actually compete with them. That anybody would believe these companies' complaints about "fairness" is dumbfounding, yet given their political power, these arguments go much further than they should. AT&T, for example, is telling Nashville politicians they only oppose Google Fiber's reform plan because they care so much about unions:

“While we have not seen the proposed ordinance, we are concerned that a make-ready ordinance would interfere with our contractual commitment to have our skilled employees represented by the Communications Workers of America perform make-ready work on our behalf,” says AT&T Tennessee spokesperson Joe Burgan. “Beyond that, we have serious concerns with other companies being allowed to perform work on our facilities without providing us notice, which could put service reliability and public safety at risk in some circumstances. Additionally, jurisdiction to regulate pole attachments rests with the FCC, and municipalities have no authority under federal or state law to enact the ordinance being proposed here.”

To be very clear, such "one touch make ready" reform rules are broadly supported as a way to speed up broadband deployment. Contrary to AT&T's claim, under most implementations of these rules, incumbent ISPs still receive forewarning about upcoming work, they just have to respond and approve (or reject, with reasons) these requests on a much shorter time scale so they can't use the system to unfair advantage. And it's not "other companies" performing the work, it's independent, licensed and insured third party contractors that have already been doing this kind of work all over the country -- often for the incumbents themselves.

These are the same companies that bitch endlessly about "burdensome regulations," yet consistently write, lobby for and pass regulations that hinder competitors from disrupting the market. In this case, AT&T's next likely step is to file a lawsuit against Nashville just as it did in Louisville, all the while pretending (despite a generation of contradictory evidence) it's just a stickler for level playing fields.

from the fool-me-sixteen-times,-shame-on-me dept

We've long discussed how Verizon has a bit of a pattern of getting billions in tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for fiber broadband it only half deploys. State after state, city after city, Verizon gets politicians to sign off on cozy deals that effectively give Verizon everything it wants -- in exchange for promises of "full" city or state fiber broadband deployment. Except time, and time, and time again, cities that signed these sweetheart, loophole filled deals then stand around with a dopey look on their face when they realize they've been had.

"Mayor Martin J. Walsh today announced a new partnership with Verizon to make Boston one of the most technologically advanced cities in the country by replacing its copper-based infrastructure with a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network platform across the city. The new network will offer enormous bandwidth and speeds. Through an investment of more than $300 million from Verizon over six years, this change will bring increased competition and choice for broadband and entertainment services in Boston, and support the ongoing efforts to spur innovation and economic opportunity in all neighborhoods."

This announcement was quickly translated by the press as "FiOS is coming to the entire city," though if you look more carefully at the language it becomes clear that Verizon isn't actually promising that:

"This will be a fiber platform across the entire city,” Verizon Wireline Network president Bob Mudge said at an event at the Bolling municipal building in Dudley Square Tuesday. “This is not just about a fiber investment — that’s important, and it’s a fuel. But the fire and the excitement will come from the applications.”

If you study the release it's actually pretty ambiguous as to what Boston gets out of the deal. What's actually happening? Verizon struck a $300 million deal with the city that will deliver a combination of fiber, wireless service, fiber backhaul for wireless towers, and Verizon's internet of things technologies. Much of this is stuff Verizon already planned to spend money on (especially wireless backhaul), and a sizable chunk of it (especially on the IOT front) may or may not actually wind up actually benefiting anybody, as the mindlessly over-hyped IOT is wont to do.

How much actual last mile fiber is left utterly ambiguous. Learning lessons from failures of the past, Verizon isn't getting specific, though speaking on an earnings call this week Verizon made it pretty clear most of these connections will be fifth generation (5G) wireless:

"I think of 5G initially as, in effect, wireless fiber, which is wireless technology that can provide an enhanced broadband experience that could only previously be delivered with physical fiber to the customer," McAdam said. "With wireless fiber, the so-called last mile can be a virtual connection, dramatically changing our cost structure."

And while 5G wireless should be faster with lower latency than existing 4G connections, it's not truly going to be a substitute for traditional fiber. The 5G standard itself hasn't even been agreed upon yet, and most analysts don't believe 5G will see serious deployment any time before 2020. There's also a matter of cost: while Verizon FiOS is uncapped, Verizon Wireless service is capped, metered, and among the most expensive in the country, and 5G will be no exception. It's a $300 million investment, yes, but what it's being invested into isn't really clear.

"We will create a single fiber optic platform that is capable of supporting wireless and wireline technologies and multiple products," McAdam said. "In particular, we believe the fiber deployment will create economic growth for Boston and we are talking to other cities about similar partnerships."

Most reporters covering Verizon's plans can't be bothered to note Verizon's long history of not delivering what it promises, or the multiple hearings ongoing in several different states trying to hold Verizon accountable for that fact. Fast forward several years from now, and you'll likely find Boston (and any other cities excited to "partner" with Verizon without reading the fine print) complaining that Verizon delivered only a small fraction of what was actually promised. You'll also find a media incapable of tying all of these narrative threads together.

Still, on a positive note it's great to see Verizon spending anything at all on cities it has been neglecting for the better part of a decade, given this was the same company that claimed net neutrality would kill all telecom investment dead in the water.

from the defenders-of-the-status-quo dept

Earlier this year, we noted how companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable were engaged in incessant whining about Google Fiber's planned entry into Louisville, Kentucky. More specifically, the ISPs were upset that Louisville passed "one touch make ready" fiber rules that dramatically speed up fiber deployment times by letting licensed third-party contractors move other ISPs' equipment when necessary. Such reforms generally help all ISPs by dramatically reducing the time it takes to deploy fiber infrastructure, often by as much as half a year.

"One touch make-ready policies are an effective and equitable way to reduce the disruption and inconvenience that come from work by multiple pole construction crews. One touch policies allow any communications service provider putting new attachments on a pole to perform all make-ready work that does not result in a customer outage, using contractors from a list approved by the utility pole owner. One touch is efficient because a single construction crew —a crew with enough skill and experience to be approved by the pole owner itself—is all that is needed to complete pole make-ready to deploy new broadband facilities."

AT&T traditionally loves to complain about "burdensome regulations" at any and every opportunity (even given the fact its lawyers often write state telecom law). But when said burdensome regulations defend the status quo, you'll note the company's tune changes dramatically. In Louisville, first the mega-ISPs tried to claim that their Constitutional rights were being violated. When that didn't work, AT&T filed a lawsuit claiming that such rules would only hurt consumers by disrupting existing broadband service.

Several months later and Frontier has now filed a brief in support of AT&T's lawsuit (free registration required), despite the fact that the ISP doesn't even offer broadband service in Louisville or the state of Kentucky. Frontier's obviously just worried that the menacing specter of increased competition could spread into its territories, so like AT&T, the brief tries desperately to portray one-touch-make-ready rules as a huge threat to stable service:

"The Ordinance strips the utility pole owner of the right to negotiate key terms of access that are designed to minimize disruption and delay to the consumer," Frontier says in its brief. "These terms not only protect the public, but they also safeguard the pole owner’s rights and equipment, as well as the rights and equipment of already existing attachers."

Except that's nonsense, and ISPs have a long, rich history of using utility pole regulations to try and block competition. Again, these reforms benefit everybody building networks, not just Google Fiber. We're also not talking about some random, drunk yahoo climbing utility poles to tug on expensive telecom equipment. Under the rules all parties agree to a licensed, insured third-party contractor to do the work, the installer must give ISPs notification of any scheduled work, and the work can only proceed if the installers don't get a response from the gear owner within thirty days.

Such pole attachment reforms help everybody -- except giant incumbent ISPs, who'd prefer things remain as uncompetitive as possible. AT&T's lawsuit is little more than a giant advertisement for Google Fiber, and for AT&T and Frontier's absolute terror at the possibility of actually having to compete.

from the rinse,-wash-repeat dept

Verizon's modus operandi has been fairly well established by now: convince state or local leaders to dole out millions in tax breaks and subsidies -- in exchange for fiber that's either only partially delivered, or not delivered at all. Given this story has repeated itself in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York City and countless other locations, there's now a parade of communities asking somebody, anybody, to actually hold Verizon's feet to the fire. Given Verizon's political power (especially on the state level) those calls go unheeded, with Verizon lawyers consistently able to wiggle around attempts to hold the telco to account.

In Pennsylvania, the story is much the same as elsewhere. Verizon was able to convince state leaders in the '90s to dole out billions in handouts for state-wide symmetrical 45 Mbps fiber broadband. But a decade later when people finally noticed fiber was nowhere to be found, Verizon managed to convince state leaders to effectively forget about the obligation entirely. Fast forward another decade and, after striking a 2009 franchise deal with the city of Philadelphia (again promising full city deployment of its FiOS fiber broadband service) you'll be shocked to discover what happened:

"Philadelphia government officials are investigating whether Verizon has met an obligation to bring FiOS service to all residents of the city. Verizon obtained a cable franchise agreement from the city in February 2009, and the deadline to wire up all of Philadelphia passed on February 26 of this year...Philadelphia seems skeptical about whether Verizon actually met its obligation, but it is still looking for proof. The city set up a webpage asking residents to fill out a form to "tell us whether you have tried to order Verizon service but have been told by the company that service is not yet available in your neighborhood."

Traditionally, ISPs can get away with this not only because they effectively own state legislatures, but because nobody in any part of government actually bothers to audit company deployment promises. What passes as an audit generally involves the ISP submitting its own claims that regulators fail to fact check. That's why Philadelphia leaders are being forced to crowdsource whether or not Verizon met its promises. Meanwhile, Verizon tells Philly city council leaders that they're unable to offer statistics right now on their FiOS deployment because, uh, unions:

"Philadelphia should learn from New York's experience, Philadelphia City Council member Bobby Henon said during a hearing two weeks ago. “We do not want this to happen in Philadelphia,” Henon said, according to an article published by Technical.ly Philly. Henon wanted good data, but Verizon said it couldn't provide it yet because of the ongoing Verizon workers' strike. Verizon also said, “Any claims made at the hearing that we haven’t completed our obligations of our franchise agreement are untrue," according to the article."

At this point there's plenty of blame to go around for the fact that history just keeps repeating itself without getting fixed. For one thing, just like in New York City, city leaders keep signing sweetheart deals with endless loopholes designed by Verizon lawyers, then acting shocked when Verizon actually uses those loopholes. For example, several city agreements let Verizon simply pass a set total of homes with fiber (anywhere up to several blocks away), instead of technically "serving" them. Other contracts contain language letting Verizon dodge or buy their way out of deployment obligations if certain TV uptake metrics aren't met.

These are clauses cities have been warned repeatedly about but choose to ignore. Bad deals are struck behind closed doors by one administration, with subsequent city leaders left holding the bag. By that point Verizon can successfully argue that they technically met the terms of such deals, because the terms of such deals were designed to be malleable. Granted that doesn't excuse Verizon's proclivity for ripping off taxpayers on an industrial scale, but this dance of dysfunction wouldn't be quite so embarrassingly uncoordinated if cities would stop signing deals that promise the moon, but deliver stinky cheese.

from the beneath-the-hype dept

Despite government programs, national broadband plans, billions in subsidies and a lot of recent hype paid to gigabit services like Google Fiber, U.S. broadband is actually getting less competitive than ever before across a huge swath of the country. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have been backing away from unwanted DSL networks they simply don't want to upgrade. In some cases this involves selling these assets to smaller telcos (who take on so much debt they can't upgrade them either), but in many markets this involves actively trying to drive customers away via either rate hikes or outright neglect.

As an end result, the nation's biggest cable companies are enjoying a larger monopoly in many markets than ever before as they hoover up those fleeing customers. According to the latest postmortem of 2015 subscriber totals, the seventeen largest broadband providers acquired 3.1 million broadband subscribers last year. But if you look at the numbers more closely, you'll notice that nearly all of them were acquired by the cable industry:

In fact, cable added 97% of the 6.1 million subscribers added in the last two years. Phone companies, meanwhile, lost about 185,000 subscribers last year -- the first time in the history of broadband that they saw a net loss. Again, that's because many of these companies either no longer want to be in the fixed-line broadband business because they're focusing on wireless (AT&T, Verizon) or they're growing just for growth's sake (Frontier, CenturyLink), acquiring neglected AT&T and Verizon assets, but saddling themselves with so much debt in the process they can't afford necessary upgrades.

That's great news for cable. Less fixed-line competition means they can charge higher prices, yet have less incentive to improve what's arguably already the worst customer service in the history of industry. More importantly, the cable industry can begin experimenting with usage caps and metered billing without the pesky threat of a customer being able to leave. Of course, if you ask cable providers, they'll be quick to assert they face greater competition than ever before -- but the reality is in many markets they either face no real competition or a sagging telco trying to push 3 Mbps DSL as the pinnacle of innovation.

And indeed, recent FCC data suggests that two-thirds of homes currently only have the choice of one ISP (cable) that's capable of providing speeds that even meet the new standard FCC broadband definition of 25 Mbps. ISPs and loyal Congressional allies have been whining about this higher standard precisely because it only highlights the markets slow transition to cable broadband monopoly.

That's not to downplay the impact of efforts like Google Fiber, which are going a long way to spur competition in select markets. But Google Fiber is really only focusing on a dozen or so profitable markets, and in some ways our gigabit obsession has overshadowed the fact that the majority of towns and cities are facing a stronger cable broadband monopoly (and therefore higher prices for the kinds of speeds people actually use) than ever before. That's something Tucows/Ting executive Elliot Noss touched on briefly in an interesting bit over at Medium talking about the company's own piecemeal broadband improvement efforts.

It's understandable that any given week the media would prefer to talk about the feel-good aspects of the gigabit economy, but the reality is that, thanks to telco apathy, Congressional incompetence and cable consolidation, we've quietly built a bigger, bolder cable broadband monopoly. The solution? Either waiting for wireless to mature as a fixed-line alternative (which, given current LTE usage caps and prices, could be quite a wait), or eliminating the state-level barriers erected by local duopolists, designed to prevent grass root efforts to kick-start something vaguely resembling real broadband competition.